Coulda, Woulda, Shirkers

GERRIE LIM reconnects with Sandi Tan, director of a weird and wonderful reclamation of a youthful ambition-fuelled road movie gone 25 years off track, ahead of the films worldwide premiere on Netflix this month

SOMEWHERE INSIDE SHIRKERS, there’s a quirky Singapore circa 1992 showcasing a fi lm fi rst shot when Sandi Tan was 19 and which makes her revisit the place. It starts with “freedom, by building worlds inside our heads — as a creative person, I still continue to believe this,” the Pasadena-based fi lmmaker says. “But it was especially true when one was a teenager in 1980s and 1990s Singapore, before the Internet, before easy access to the movies and books I craved. “

Shirkers was made with Tan’s friends Jasmine Ng (the fi lm’s editor) and Sophia Siddique Harvey (its producer, now on the faculty of the Vassar College) with initial participation from American “director” Georges Cardona who, in larger-than-life fashion, absconded with the 16-mm fi lm reels. After he died in 2007, his exwife sent Tan 70 canisters of fi lm between 2011 and 2012, along with boxes of storyboards, scripts and scraps of paper he had kept.

Culling a trailer from the fi lms while a member of the Sundance Documentary Fellows programme, Tan submitted it for grants in 2016. And in such manner did she cleverly “fi nish” the movie. A coming-of-age tale underscored by a fi lm noir exposé, Shirkers received rowdy applause at the Egyptian Theatre in Utah in January and a 100-percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Tan, who has two other short fi lms to her name and whose haunting novel The Black Isle was published in 2012, won Best Director in World Cinema Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for Shirkers. It is set to premiere on Netfl ix on October 26 in 190 countries and 25 languages, and premieres in Singapore on October 20, co-presented by the Singapore Film Society as part of its 60th anniversary celebrations.